Young Jan

Corresponding author: Matthew S. Meselson, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.

THE Editorial Committee for this issue of GENETICS honoring JAN DRAKE has directed that we "jointly write some recollections." Our earliest shared recollections of Jan are from a 3-year interval 40 years ago. This extended from the summer of 1954 at Woods Hole, just after Jan had obtained his B.S. at Yale, until the summer of 1957 when he completed his doctoral work at Caltech.

Woods Hole was an exciting place in 1954, only a year after the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA. There was spirited talk about the next range of mysteries that had come within view: How can amino acid sequences be coded by DNA? How does the DNA duplex replicate? How does it mutate? What is the role of RNA?

But it was another sort of spirit that first brought the three of us together. On Jan's initiative, he and Frank established the famous "Gin and Tonic Tree" a cut-rate canteen beneath a tree across the street from the Lilly Building. There we and other friends came to sit on the grass to imbibe and to talk about the new biology.

Our next recollection involving Jan is of a night-time swimming party in the buff at Stony Beach. When refreshments began to run low, Jan, unclad, unshod and accompanied by a participating woman biologist, braved the local constabulary to go to his room for a fresh supply. This combination of exciting ideas, good talk and carefree celebrations, all much enlivened by Jan, was to continue at Caltech.

During 1954–57, we shared a spacious Victorian house (Pasadena style) at the corner of Chester and San Pasqual, across the street from the Crellin Laboratory of Chemistry and the Church Laboratory of Biology. At Jan's invitation, HOWARD TEMIN joined the household around 1956. There was constant science talk—at dinner, at regular Sunday brunches, after nighttime lab work, often with nonresident regulars JOHN CAIRNS, RICK DAVERN, and ANN ROLLER. Weekend parties brought MAX and MANNY DELBRUCK and DICK FEYNMAN and guests imported by Jan from Scripps College in Pomona. With unfailing cheerfulness and energy, Jan took care of gardening and house cleaning, climbed the palm trees to cut off dead fronds, built our dining room table, and helped fill our social calendar.

As an undergraduate at Yale, Jan had studied fish development with J. P. TRINKAUS and, together with TEMIN, began Caltech graduate studies with embryologist ALFRED TYLER. Here, he again demonstrated entrepreneurial talent by establishing in the Caltech dormitories a profitable network for the collection of fresh semen, a reagent necessary for TYLER's research. After a few months, however, Jan and Howard decided that methods did not yet exist for effective attack on the basic problems of development. Abandoning the safe haven of classical embryology for the risks of the new field of quantitative animal virology, they both transferred to the laboratory of RENATO DULBECCO, and apprenticed with MARGUERITE VOGT.

Could an RNA virus undergo genetic recombination? No one knew and there were no genetic markers to answer the question. Undaunted, Jan conducted a careful demonstration of multiplicity reactivation of UV-inactivated polio virus and, with appropriate caveats, argued that this could reflect the occurrence of recombination. More importantly for virology, Jan's thesis work demonstrated that viral interference occurred at the single-cell level. RENATO liked the resulting dissertation and Jan departed to take up a postdoctoral Fulbright Fellowship in Israel.

The three of us moved on with our research and family lives. Jan joined the faculty at Urbana where he began his major and still continuing work on mutagenesis. In 1960, he spent a summer in Oxford and, while passing through Coventry, encountered Pam. An accelerating courtship led to marriage in December of the same year. Leaving Illinois in 1977, he went to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina to head a group studying mutagenesis. In 1982, he and Pam established the Mom and Pop Editorial Shop for GENETICS described in this issue. Geneticists everywhere owe Jan and Pam a great debt of gratitude for restoring GENETICS to its position as the premier journal of our science.

Genetics research today is a distant cry from that of 1954. Yet in this much larger, more complex environment, Jan remains as unpretentious, playful, generous, and dauntless as when we were all beginners in a miraculous new world of science.

View larger version (85K): In this window In a new window Download PPT slide   Figure 1. Jan about 1958 practicing animal virology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.